Book Probes the Minds of Hillary and Donald

This is a stranger-than-fiction campaign many of us want to forget. So is it too soon to wallow in the reality of it?

That question bedevils Maureen Dowd’s book on the 2016 presidential race, “The Year of Voting Dangerously,” a rolling, roiling collection of her columns — mainly ridiculing the two political figures she, like most of us, loves to loathe: Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump.

Put aside whether cobbling together a bunch of newspaper columns with a small amount of fresh material is too easy a way to publish a “new book.” Dowd has spent two decades mining (and mocking) the minds of these two very American, and often tragic, figures. We are living in a raging bull market for a biting New York Times columnist to describe as bull two New York grandparents ensconced in the bubble of the upper .01 percent while championing the ordinary people they know mostly as staff.

Dowd was born to write about this race. And she dissects its main characters with poison in her pen and poetic punch in her delivery. She unleashes these talents mercilessly, if occasionally redundantly. — The New York Times